The Memorial Day Flood

Jory had gone home early. I was tidying up the soap shop when I heard a loud thump coming from the storage area where I saw a river of yellow palm oil gushing towards me! The bottom pail of a 3 pail stack had collapsed under the weight causing the 2 on top to topple to the ground. We'd done it this way before so I wasn't sure why they didn't hold up this time. All I knew was this was gonna take a VERY LONG TIME to clean up...not to mention the 20 gallons of organic oil we'd just wasted. This shows only part of the disaster area. An ooey gooey mess.

Sobbing profusely, I ran over to get my husband who brought over 2 flat nosed shovels and we began scooping the mess up as best we could. As you can imagine, 20 gallons of oil on a concrete floor was mighty slippery. It's a wonder we didn't break our necks. In his infinite wisdom, he reminded me to look at the bright side. It wasn't toxic and our dog (who was eagerly lapping it up) would probably never be constipated again.

After scooping up most of it, we dumped 8 bags of kitty litter on the remaining oil slick to absorb what was left overnight.  Of course we didn't have 8 bags of kitty litter lying around (we don't even own a cat) so we had to make a 28 mile round trip to the grocery store too.

An hour or so with a broom and a vacuum should finish the job up this morning. Then I'll move everything back into the storage area, some of it a little worse for the wear.

We'll look back on this and laugh some day. And when we talk about the Memorial Day flood, we won't necessarily be referring to the major disaster that hit Austin in 1981 either! Heck, this might even become a Facebook milestone.